


Broken Threads

by linaerys



Category: The Prestige (movie)
Genre: F/F, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2006, recipient:Milla
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-25
Updated: 2006-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-21 06:57:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/222208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linaerys/pseuds/linaerys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sarah and Olivia have a romantic relationship (unknown by Alfred).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Broken Threads

Olivia didn't go to the gravesite until after the funeral party had left. The gulf between respectability and the shabby _demi monde_ in which Olivia lived could not be crossed, even for death. She waited for a while at another grave, neglected and rain-etched, with her back turned, but she could imagine Freddy and his shadow, Fallon, standing over the grave, casting handfuls of dirt in. The weather had not obliged the family with rain, and instead the tomb and fresh dirt were mottled with early fall sunshine. It would have been a brilliant day for a picnic. The fresh dirt mounded over the grave looked like a garden plot.

Olivia stood with her back turned until the last of Sarah's mourners left, then finally walked over. She wore a sheer black veil over her face, and a long black dress that she had not worn since ending her mourning for her mother, five years earlier. She wouldn't wear mourning long this time. There was no proper way to mourn the wife of the man who kept you.

She had one last task to perform for Sarah before she could leave all this behind, leave Freddy and his strange obsessions, even leave this dirty city.

Sarah could get away with talking like a bad novel. "Find out if he loved me," she said. "If I die," she said, and Olivia hadn't realized that if would be a certainty.

Freddy never talked about Sarah. At first Olivia loved him because Sarah did, because good sweet Sarah never loved wrong. Loving Freddy too kept Olivia from feeling excluded by their little family, kept her bound to them by as many threads as she could.

Olivia remembered when Sarah told her she met Freddy--Alfred she called him, and Olivia had taken to imagining Sarah's husband Alfred and her own Freddy as two different people. It made it easier.

"He's charming like a little boy," said Sarah of Freddy, when she first met him. "His guile is so innocent." She smiled like a broken doll, the same sweetly sad, hopeful smile that made Olivia search out her hand between their desks those years ago in school. Olivia's family had been rich then, and respectable, and her beauty and poise made her the queen of her little circle of schoolgirls. Olivia should have sneered at Sarah, at the thinning elbows of her frocks, at her frizzy hair that must have seen the application of a hot iron but rarely. She had sneered at many Sarahs before this one.

Sarah did chores to help pay her freight at the school, and taught the smaller children their writing. She sat down in the seat next to Olivia, and stuck out her hand to "shake" on that first day. Olivia heard the titters of her friends, but this time, instead of joining them, took Olivia's hand in hers.

"I'm Olivia," she said.

"I know," said Sarah, worshipful.

"You musn't shake hands like that," said Olivia. "It isn't done."

Sarah took her tutelage, but had a mind of her own as well. Sarah was frightened her first night away from home and Olivia let her stay in the fine single room the Wenscombe money purchased, snuggled up next to her in the feather bed, rather than sleeping under the attic eaves with the other scholarship girls. "I used to sleep next to my mother," Sarah said. "I miss her."

Sarah's mother died a few weeks before she went to the school, which may have been why she seemed to Olivia like a sad, broken, bird, but that tragedy settled into her demeanor. Olivia found herself envious, especially later, of Sarah's ability to make people want to please her. Everyone wanted to take the sadness out of her smile. Olivia, they figured, could stand on her own.

And she needed to when her family lost their money: a tawdry first act of a tawdry play. In Sarah's novels, Olivia would have been swept off her feet by a rich duke, married over the objections of the duke's family, and would become mistress of a great house. On the moors, Sarah always added. She had a Londoner's fascination with England's wild country.

Instead Olivia became the mistress of nothing more than a banker, who kept her on a short leash. She and Sarah still met during those times, but covertly. Olivia lived in an anonymously masculine hotel, then. Visiting merchants, even less handsome and generous than Olivia's were the only tenants. If they kept mistresses at all, they didn't keep them there.

Olivia didn't mind the stuffy company, for it meant that Sarah could visit without fear of scandal. It was during one of those visits that Sarah asked, how Olivia could make free of herself to a man outside of marriage. Did she love him? Sarah asked, and Olivia smiled, half-fond, half-sardonic.

"Love doesn't enter much into it, I've found."

She hadn't meant to let Freddy fall in love with her, not at first, but neither could she betray him as Angier wanted. Sarah had hated her being with Angier, too. Sarah hated anything that took Olivia's focus from her.

"How can you be with him?" asked Sarah, when she discovered. "Alfred told me Angier had a new assistant. He thinks your sleight of hand is sloppy." Sarah tried to toss her hair haughtily, but succeeded only in looking more hurt.

"I love Angier," said Olivia, slow and measured. She wasn't sure if it was true. Angier was handsome, with a darkness that echoed Olivia's own, but so cold.

"How can you love my husband's enemy? And still love me? We live on pennies, while Angier's show is a success. And you help him!"

After the birth of Jess, Olivia didn't see Sarah for a while. She couldn't visit Sarah, for what right would someone like her have in their home? She was a woman of hotel rooms, not family hearths. Sarah would have to come to her. Six months later she finally received a note from Sarah, written in her fine, graceful hand, asking to see her.

Sarah looked more thin and worn than Olivia had ever seen her, when she finally came back to that hotel room. Olivia was afraid to touch her lest she would break, and she couldn't meet Olivia's eyes.

"I want to know," said Sarah, before they began any of their rituals of talking and tea, of undressing and kissing, "how to please . . ." her voice broke and she couldn't continue.

"I can't have any more children, and I want to know, how to please Alfred without . . ." Sarah turned her tear-filled eyes toward Olivia.

"You want my whore's tricks," said Olivia flatly.

"I don't want him to have to find a mistress."

Their last night together was just like so many others, their ritual unchanged even as Sarah grew more and more unhappy. First Sarah undid Olivia's hair, taking out the pins and strings, the occasional flower. She combed it through her fingers. She loved Olivia's hair, for being so much thicker and richer than Sarah's. Like everything else about Olivia. Sarah combed it through her fingers and pulled it in a way half sisterly and half not.

She stopped when she had undone the buttons on the back of Olivia's dress, and held Olivia's heavy hair between her hands. "Why do you think he's like that, like two different people?"

"He needs his secrets," said Olivia. She spent less time thinking about it than Sarah did. A mistress had to accept the man she had, where a wife, at least a wife like Sarah, seemed determined to change him.

"I hate his secrets," said Sarah, tugging on Olivia's hair almost hard enough to hurt. They never spoke about it, though Sarah doubtless knew, what Olivia and Freddy did every week or so, on the small matress in the workshop. Freddy told Sarah that Fallon slept there, but Fallon had his own hidey hole, and that pallet was not for sleeping.

Sarah liked to punish her, near the end, with reproachful glances, and a refusal to be satisfied. Only Sarah, thought Olivia, could punish by giving too much. She wanted to touch Olivia everywhere, but cringed when Olivia touched her. She was drunk that last time, the sweet sour tang of claret on her lips. She drank so daintily, even when she drank so much. Her thin frame swayed with the alcohol in her blood.

"Do you love me today?" Sarah asked, one hand on the door knob of Olivia's tiny room, as if she might flee any moment. The shoulder strap of her stays drooped over her translucent shoulder

"I love you every day," said Olivia. "You know I do."

"Yes, you do," said Sarah. "That just makes it worse."

Olivia sat with Freddy in a restaurant, and let herself be seen by the passers by, for now it was time to find someone new, someone to take her away. Freddy seemed no different than he ever had, and Olivia wished she could shake him like a rag, make him bend and break the way Sarah had for him.

"She was a part of your life," said Olivia, searching his eyes for some sign of the anguish she felt. His boyish smile looked more false than the beard he wore to perform, a façade that he didn't pretend to believe anymore.

"I didn't love her," he said. "I love you."

Yes, if Olivia had been his wife, perhaps she would have recoiled so hard from that coldness that only death would warm her again. She could see how Sarah had.

"How can anyone be so inhuman?" she asked, before standing up and leaving him without a backward glance.

So you have your answer, Sarah, thought Olivia. She walked back to Borden's workshop and removed the few of her personal items that she kept there. She thought of writing him a note, but what would it say? "Sarah deserved better than either one of us," perhaps she would write. Perhaps that should be her epitaph.

  



End file.
